


Quiet Like That

by Lomonaaeren



Series: July Celebration Fics [18]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-25 08:24:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7525504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco has his own House pride, and his own conception of what’s romantic. But for once, he wants to do something that will fit someone else’s notions of it, and even someone else’s notions of House pride. Specifically, Harry Potter’s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet Like That

**Author's Note:**

> Another of my July Celebration fics, for witchravenfox, who gave me the prompt: _I would love to see a fic where Harry and Draco have managed to get along for 8th year, and one of them makes a romantic gesture towards the end of it (preferably Draco- show him catching some Gryffindor pride). I don't mind how it all unfolds, I like the idea of something happening in The Great Hall, but anywhere would be cool._

Draco stared at the box lying on his desk, and then away. His hands shook. He stuffed them into his pockets and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, even though he already knew that there were no other boys in the bedroom right now. He wouldn’t be doing this if there were.

_Sort of ridiculous to worry about that given what you’re going to do in a few minutes._

Draco shuddered and shook his head. Yes, fine, he was going to take a gigantic risk that might result in public humiliation, but he could still avoid small risks until it came to that point, surely?

He snapped up the box and slid it into his pocket. Then he cast the necessary spells, concentrating on the movements of his wand in his hand and the shape of the incantations on his lips. He wanted to finish this, but he also wanted to do it perfectly, and the desire for speed couldn’t overcome the desire for perfection.

Finally, he had the proper Transfigured object in his hand—a Galleon that his spells had made as big as his fist. Draco clenched his fingers around it, ignoring the way that the edges peeked out through his fingers.

In a minute, one way or another, all of this would be done.

*

Draco entered the Great Hall late, something he hadn’t done all year. Then again, he had never _wanted_ to wait until all eyes would be on him. Early in the year, he’d scurried to his seat and avoided everyone’s eyes. He wanted to get his NEWTs done and then get out of Hogwarts and never come back.

Draco’s eyes turned in the direction they were always turning now, straight to Harry Potter, who lounged in his chair at the center of the Gryffindor table and laughed with his friends. Once, Draco would have thought he was holding court there, and he would have sneered automatically even as he scurried.

No longer.

Harry was the one who had caught him scampering along a corridor one day and encouraged him to stand up and show some pride. Draco’s hands closed hard, on the box and on the Transfigured Galleon, as he remembered.

*

“You’re not Pettigrew, Malfoy.”

The totally unexpected name swung Draco around. He stared at Potter in bewilderment, and not just because Potter was alone here with him, leaning on the wall and watching Draco with a terribly earnest sympathetic expression. “I knew Pettigrew,” Draco heard himself say blankly. “He stayed at the Manor during the war.”

Potter nodded.

“He’s dead now.”

Potter nodded again, and stood up from the wall, making his way towards Draco. Draco found himself tensing and tossing back his head entirely without intent, locking eyes with Potter. Potter kept walking, and reached out to put a hand on Draco’s shoulder.

Draco sucked in a breath and snapped up his wand so that its tip rested against the underside of Potter’s wrist. But Potter didn’t waver, and didn’t look away from Draco. His face remained locked in the same expression.

“You’re not a rat,” Potter whispered. “You did a few things that were silly and even more that were cowardly, but you’re not even as old as Pettigrew was when he did his. You don’t have to let the war define your life.”

“I’m not. I’m here, aren’t I?”

Potter looked straight at him, and it was like he saw into the bottom of Draco’s soul. Draco felt his eyes drop, and then Potter reached out and gently nudged his chin with folded fingers, making him lift it again.

“You still haven’t tried to make any friends,” Potter said. “Not even with some of the younger Slytherins who were trying to reach out to you. And I know you don’t have a real plan for yourself after Hogwarts. What are you going to _do_ if you don’t do more than this, Malfoy? Do you expect to simply wear away your life the way you’re wearing away your last school year?”

Draco tried to say something, but every particle of sense had deserted him except the words hammering over and over again in his head: _He saw. He cared._

Not even Mother and Father, adjusting as they were to house arrest and restrictions on Father’s magic for a year, had bothered to notice how badly Draco was doing. _He_ was allowed to leave the house as long as he stayed strictly at Hogwarts, with no trips even to Hogsmeade. They seemed to think that meant he was okay.

But Potter was right. Draco had no friends, no connections, no prospects even of a marriage alliance, the way he had once assumed he would have by now. Both his parents had certainly known who they would marry when they were his age.

Potter saw.

Draco tried to scrape his tongue off the floor of his mouth, and whispered, “I don’t know how to make this—real.”

“You’ll find a way,” Potter said, and squeezed his shoulder, and took his hand away. But then he didn’t walk off, and leave Draco to wonder how. He added, “Do you need a study partner? And a friend? I could be that.”

Draco stared at him, and said the words he wouldn’t have said if Potter hadn’t taken him so utterly by surprise. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because I lost something during the war,” Potter said, and Draco waited, eyebrows rising, feeling like himself for the first time since he’d returned to Hogwarts. It could have been anything Potter would say, and still Draco didn’t expect the words when they came. “My tolerance for seeing people suffer. If I can see it and do something about it, then I will.”

And those words soothed Draco, even as he accepted, even as he watched Potter walk away and more than half-thought he wouldn’t keep his word, even as he considered that this meant he was _really_ just another of Potter’s charity cases. Because of all the people Potter could have tried to stop from suffering, Draco would not have thought he would be one of them.

But he was. And when Potter walked up to him in library with his NEWT Herbology books and asked if Draco understood what Sprout had been on about the other day, something in Draco’s heart relaxed forever.

*

Draco turned towards the Gryffindor table, and started to walk in that direction.

He could pinpoint the exact moment when people began to notice him and wonder what he was doing. He’d had to learn to judge the direction of people’s stares pretty accurately in the past year, after all. Their buzz rose, and a few people actually leaned over from Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw and yelled at him.

“On your way to betray someone else, Malfoy?”

“Think you can manage to scar someone in the next ten minutes?”

“Practiced your torture lately? Think the Gryffindors can stand it?”

It was Harry who had taught him to ignore those words, because they were always uttered by people who hadn’t been victims of any of Draco’s betrayals or crimes. The people who had been were at different schools, out of Hogwarts, or already in the process of demanding something else from him, like the public apology in Gryffindor Tower that Weasley had demanded for being the indirect cause of Greyback scarring his older brother.

The memory that remained of that evening, for Draco, wasn’t Weasley’s satisfied smile when he straightened up, or the burning of his own ears, but the way Harry had stared at him, surprised and a little dazzled, as if he had never thought Draco would actually go through with it.

People who hadn’t suffered had no opinion to offer that could bother him.

Harry had noticed him by now, and was smiling as if he thought Draco could use the extra encouragement. That was probably always true, Draco thought, as he halted in front of Harry and took a deep breath. Harry would understand the true import of his gesture once he saw the little box, but Draco wanted to show him the Galleon first.

As he opened his fist and saw Harry’s eyes widen, he had to smile. It reminded him of the evening a fortnight ago when he had decided that he was probably in love with Harry Potter.

*

“I don’t know why everyone always talks about how cold it is up here. It’s warm right now.”

Draco had to open an eye as Harry joined him on the battlements of Gryffindor Tower. Both of them had ridden brooms up to the very top, where no one except owls seemed to come. “That’s because I cast a Heating Charm on the stones first.”

Harry, being himself, or the person he had become in the year since the war, only laughed at his own expense and flung himself down beside Draco. Draco winced automatically, but if Harry was hurt, it must have been minor. He folded his arms behind his head and stared up at the stars.

“You know you can depend on me, right?”

The words were soft, and Draco had to wonder if he’d heard them. Then he turned his head and saw Harry’s mounting nervousness, and realized that, yes, Harry had said them, and meant them.

 _He’s probably nervous that I_ won’t _take advantage of his kindness, rather than that I will,_ Draco thought, and that moved him. He reached out, caught Harry’s hand, and squeezed it as hard as he could.

“I will come to you if I ever need anything,” he said. “But thanks to you, I actually have a flat and a job lined up when I leave school. It’s hard to imagine what else you could give me right now.” Granted, the flat was in a small wizarding village on the Outer Hebrides, and cheap because not many wizards wanted to live that close to Hebridean Black dragons, and the job was helping to run an apothecary in southern Ireland. Draco would have to make several Apparition jumps to work every morning.

But none of it would have existed at all if it wasn’t for Harry. Draco would have been planning to go home and join his parents in huddling inside Malfoy Manor. And that was the way he thought of it now, huddling, despite all the good reasons they had for doing it.

“Anything.”

Draco blinked, brought back from his thoughts by the sincerity shining in Harry’s eyes. It was clear that he meant it, and almost painfully so, so that Draco had to clear his throat and look away. But Harry only patted his arm, instead of seeming resentful.

“That’s not an offer you would make to just anyone,” Draco accused in a low voice. Far from feeling like a charity case, he had come to feel that he _could_ trust Harry because Harry was so kind and generous to everyone.

“I know. But there’s not that many people that I would want to be that useful to—outside the Weasleys, and they’ve already told me over and over that they don’t need anything else from me.” Harry took a deep, noisy breath. “But I haven’t made the offer to you before.”

Draco turned back to him. Harry was watching him with a return, almost, of the anxiety that he’d shown in the beginning of the year, when he used to find Draco regularly hexed, before Harry had started teaching him defensive spells that weren’t Dark or illegal.

“I can’t think of anything,” Draco began.

“Oh.” Harry’s eyes dropped, his hand started withdrawing, and Draco caught it and flipped it over before it could. Harry’s head came up at once, and then he pushed his glasses up as if he couldn’t believe the sight of Draco’s gleaming smile.

“Right now. But I’ll let you know if I do.”

Harry went on staring at Draco’s smile for a long moment before he turned abruptly red, pulled his hand away, cleared his throat, and said, “Right.” Then he hopped on his broom and flew back into Gryffindor without even saying goodbye.

But Draco watched him go, and that was when he decided that he had the courage to declare how he was feeling, whether or not Harry was able to say the same.

And he did think, as he worked on the owl order that he would need to fulfill the scene he wanted to create, that Harry might have been trying to make much the same gesture to him. Just with Slytherin subtlety, so Draco could refuse without feeling pressured.

*

 _So it’s only fitting that I make him a Gryffindor one,_ Draco thought, and looked up at Harry, who was gaping at the Galleon. His eyes came back to Draco’s, wondering, questioning, and Draco nodded.

He didn’t feel as nervous as he’d thought he would. People were yelling, but they didn’t matter. Harry’s friends were staring, but they had let Draco into the Gryffindor common room to apologize to Weasley, and they hadn’t hexed him. What mattered most was the man in front of him.

“I came to ask you for something,” Draco said.

Harry visibly tried to look more serious and mature, the way he had when he was helping Draco find his job and his flat, although he was flabbergasted enough that it didn’t work very well. “What is it?”

“The answer to a question,” Draco said, and tapped the Galleon with his fingernail. It rang in the Great Hall, which was now mostly silent. At least that rid Draco of his fear that a curse might come at him suddenly. “Do you know what this is?”

Harry shook his head. Draco had to smile.

“It’s an invitation to you,” he said, “to share my vaults. My money. My fortune, in all senses of the word. The kind of gesture that my ancestors would make when they wanted to—be with someone.” His mouth was abruptly too small for his words. Draco licked the back of his teeth and forced himself on. “Not with a Galleon as huge as this one, usually.”

“Draco,” Harry breathed.

“But I thought you might appreciate something big enough to represent my sincerity,” Draco said, “since I can’t make it representative of the actual _size_ of my fortune.” He winked at Harry, and felt at ease, although admittedly it was the kind of ease he’d feel in the moments before he hit something on his broom after having done all he could to evade it. “A flashy gesture, because I’m not quiet. Not anymore.”

Harry’s eyes shone. He reached out and closed as much of his hand as he could around the Galleon, which by itself would have told Draco almost all he needed to know.

On the other hand, he hadn’t finished presenting all he had to present, so he took out the small box and slid to one knee. The silver ring inside flashed, and so did the emerald on it, considerably smaller and more tasteful than the Galleon.

“And this is the same question,” Draco whispered, “asked in a different way.”

Harry did open his mouth or let it fall open for a second as if he would refuse, and Draco shivered. But then he leaned out and lifted the ring from its velvet cushion by sliding his ring finger through it and raising it on high.

This time, the shouts and clapping and cursing that erupted cut through Draco’s haze and deafened him. He flinched, a little startled. Some of the reflexes that remained after the war couldn’t be trained out of him by twelve months.

But Harry bent down, and said, “Yes to both. Yes to _you_ , Draco,” and kissed him so hard that Draco couldn’t hear anything after that, not between the squeak of their lips and the pounding of blood in his ears and the clank of dishes as he rose and pulled Harry halfway across the Gryffindor table into the kiss.

Someone tried to curse them, Harry raised a Shield Charm without lifting his lips from Draco’s or much moving the ring on his hand, and Draco laughed. He thought the laughter made a little space in the silence, as some people realized he meant everything he’d said and done, and they couldn’t touch him.

But what really mattered was the look in Harry’s eyes, the sound of his voice as he said, “Yes,” again, and the clasp of his hands over Draco’s, heating the Galleon and the ring between both their skins.

_Yes. All the kinds of yes in the world._

**The End.**


End file.
